About WorkSpeak
About our presentation skills training
At WorkSpeak, our goal is help you to become a highly effective presenter. We believe confidence at public speaking is an extremely valuable life skill and particularly useful for career progression. We achieve our goal by guiding you through a Plan, Structure, Deliver approach to communicating information. Our core workshop is a safe zone which allows you to build confidence and overcome anxiety. It provides presentation and performance tips, offers you a solid and reusable proprietary template for structuring key content (The Ternigram®) and a practice space where you can be both “presenter” and “audience” while you learn to put it all together. From these vantage points you will experience “penny drop” moments which will change your approach to presenting information, forever.
Paolo Cardelli
I teach public speaking skills to organizations and private individuals all over the world, but I wasn’t always good at it. In fact, originally, I was pretty bad at it. I remember being asked to give a reading at a church wedding when in my early 20’s. I knew the passage and had practiced it a few times, but when my moment arrived, I started to realise I hadn’t done sufficient preparation. The walk up the aisle and up into the pulpit was heart pounding. I became lightheaded, dizzy and my vision became grainy. I forgot my place, couldn’t focus on the page and my mouth became too dry to speak, so I didn’t. The resulting silence was both deafening and eternal. The vicar eventually relieved me. It was an absolute and crushing disaster. At the time I was working in the London property market and from that moment actively avoided presenting. It wasn’t until several years later, working for an international bank, that through necessity I started to learn how to plan, structure and deliver information properly.
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Building Confidence and Overcoming Anxiety
I started WorkSpeak to address the very real need to build confidence and overcome anxiety in the public speaking space. Over the years I have worked with some very talented and knowledgeable people. Many of them, when giving presentations, have been nervous and seemed unsure of themselves, coming across as though they didn’t really know what they were talking about. This definitely wasn’t the case, these were subject matter experts, but something was affecting their ability to come across as the highly competent individuals they actually are. If it’s possible to come across as lacking credibility when you present with a deep knowledge of your subject matter, what must it be like for those presenting on subjects about which they are less familiar? Using my own knowledge and experience, I believed I could help others to get over their hurdles and become effective presenters too.
Presentation Tips
I validated my methods by giving presentation tips to my colleagues and monitoring the results. I imparted everything I had learnt to anyone interested in improving their presentation skills, making sure they felt safe and supported while they practiced. The improvement in presentation performance was immediate, key messaging became clearer, information supporting those messages was well structured for relevance and audience members were engaged by the way in which the subject matter was being delivered.
The increased confidence this gave to my colleagues, made me feel great about the contribution I had made to their success. Being able to make a positive difference to the professionalism of others was a highly rewarding experience for me and something I wanted to keep on doing. As a result, a business was born, and these win-win outcomes have become the cornerstone of how WorkSpeak operates: mutual benefit in everything we do.
Performance Tips
There is a performance aspect to physical presentations, because judgements are made about ‘how’ we say things as well as ‘what’ we say. For this reason, during our workshops ideas and theory are not presented “lecture style”, but emerge during a series of role-play presentations, in preparation for a work-related or personal presentation at the end of the day. In fact, participants can expect to present at least three times in the supportive environment of the group and receive both open and private feedback. Individual performance tips will help polish delivery, create the appearance of confidence and clarify the message. This process is a great opportunity to practice and improve as a presenter whilst at the same time staying true to your own unique personality. When presenting to others, genuineness and vulnerability along with your new skills, life experience and a variety of individual traits, will help build successful business relationships.
Structuring Information for Maximum Impact
Think about a presentation you recently attended. How quickly did you lose interest and switch off? If it was an interesting and engaging presentation, what made it so? I want to help you to become the best kind of interesting and engaging presenter, and I also want to make the process as simple and straightforward as possible. The Ternigram® template is our in-house template which helps make this possible. It is a blueprint used to structure information for maximum impact and you’ll be able to use it forever. The Ternigram® will become much more than a tool for structuring spoken presentation, as it is also a valuable resource for constructing reports, emails and other written material.
Get in touch
I would like to wish you every success in developing your public speaking skills. If you’d like to book a place, register your interest or simply reach out for further information, please use the contact form below. Good luck!